Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats - A Toilet That Vaporizes Your Poo. Yes, Really! - This Old Toilet 650-483-1139

The Gates Foundation is working on new types of sanitation systems for parts of the world that can’t afford modern upgrades—including a toilet that zaps waste right at home.

There are 2.5 billion people around the world who don’t have access to safe, affordable sanitation systems. That means every time they go to the bathroom they have to put themselves in an unhealthy or dangerous situation.

It’s a problem that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes can be solved by innovative technologies. And through their Reinvent The Toilet Challenge, they’ve recruited scientists and engineers from around the world to make new types of toilets and public sanitation systems for places that can’t afford modern upgrades. One of the companies they’ve funded, New Zealand-based Scion Research (a government-owned company), is developing a new type of toilet that used pressure and microwave technology to treat sewage right in people’s homes.

“We get to flush here and it gets out of our household and treated and discharged into the environment and we’re removed from the issue so we don’t have to handle it personally or live amongst it. In a large part of the developing world that’s not the case. Their proximity to their waste is constant and the risk of disease is high,” says Daniel Gapes, an environmental engineer working on the project.

So why not just work on innovating infrastructure to help bring running water and sewage treatment facilities to places in the world that don’t have them? The Gates Foundation is working on innovating this as well, Gapes says, “but the fact is that in a lot of communities the infrastructure is so complex and the buildings and people are on top of one another and lack of access makes putting infrastructure in complex and unaffordable. Putting sewage into a city that doesn’t have it—the costs are mind-boggling,” he says.

So the Scion Research team turned to a technology that is fairly well known in large-scale applications (it’s used in mining and also sewage treatment), which they think could work well if innovative methods are used to downsize it. The method is called wet oxidation. Essentially, it works by taking waste and adding oxygen and then putting everything under pressure and gently heating it to about 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-toilet-that-vaporizes-your-poo

by Erin Biba
http://www.thisoldtoilet.com

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